due.  The cleverness of Cronje’s disposition of his trenches some hundred yards ahead of the kopjes is accentuated by the fascination which any rising object has for a gunner.  Prince Kraft tells the story of how at Sadowa he unlimbered his guns two hundred yards in front of the church of Chlum, and how the Austrian reply fire almost invariably pitched upon the steeple.  So our own gunners, even at a two thousand-yard mark, found it difficult to avoid overshooting the invisible line, and hitting the obvious mark behind.

As the day wore on reinforcements of infantry came up from the force which had been left to guard the camp.  The Gordons arrived with the first and second battalions of the Coldstream Guards, and all the artillery was moved nearer to the enemy’s position.  At the same time, as there were some indications of an attack upon our right flank, the Grenadier Guards with five companies of the Yorkshire Light Infantry were moved up in that direction, while the three remaining companies of Barter’s Yorkshiremen secured a drift over which the enemy might cross the Modder.  This threatening movement upon our right flank, which would have put the Highlanders into an impossible position had it succeeded, was most gallantly held back all morning, before the arrival of the Guards and the Yorkshires, by the mounted infantry and the 12th Lancers, skirmishing on foot.  It was in this long and successful struggle to cover the flank of the 3rd Brigade that Major Milton, Major Ray, and many another brave man met his end.  The Coldstreams and Grenadiers relieved the pressure upon this side, and the Lancers retired to their horses, having shown, not for the first time, that the cavalryman with a modern carbine can at a pinch very quickly turn himself into a useful infantry soldier.  Lord Airlie deserves all praise for his unconventional use of his men, and for the gallantry with which he threw both himself and them into the most critical corner of the fight.

While the Coldstreams, the Grenadiers, and the Yorkshire Light Infantry were holding back the Boer attack upon our right flank the indomitable Gordons, the men of Dargai, furious with the desire to avenge their comrades of the Highland Brigade, had advanced straight against the trenches and succeeded without any very great loss in getting within four hundred yards of them.  But a single regiment could not carry the position, and anything like a general advance upon it was out of the question in broad daylight after the punishment which we had received.  Any plans of the sort which may have passed through Lord Methuen’s mind were driven away for ever by the sudden unordered retreat of the stricken brigade.  They had been very roughly handled in this, which was to most of them their baptism of fire, and they had been without food and water under a burning sun all day.  They fell back rapidly for a mile, and the guns were for a time left partially exposed.  Fortunately the lack of initiative on the part of the Boers which has stood our friend so often came in to save us from disaster and humiliation.  It is due to the brave unshaken face which the Guards presented to the enemy that our repulse did not deepen into something still more serious.